Re: OT: Unicode 5.0

Probably the easiest way to design a useful standard is to get rid of
the same entities.  Due to accent marks, tones, etc., we have about 50
"o" characters.  If the accent mark was a separate "modifier"
character, that could significantly reduce the number of characters
and make it more ordered.

On 1/9/06, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> >On 1/9/06, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> > > ...At risk of threadjack accusations, I'll use the opening to also fire
> >a
> > > question that's been bothering me for a while - Why does Unicode include
> > > several characters multiple times? There are 6561 different ways to
> >write
> > > "THAI POEM". If capital alpha is different from capital ay just because
> >it's
> > > used in a different alphabet to write a different language, isn't (eg)
> > > Icelandic "A" also a different character then? Are they really purposely
> > > randomly tagging unnecessary etymological/usage information to symbols,
> >or
> > > is it that they just fudged it up initially (for whatever political
> >reasons)
> > > and can't fix it at this stage any more?
> >
> >This is because Icelandic uses the same /script/ as English. Greek
> >uses a different /script/, therefore capital alpha gets its own
> >encoding, while Icelandic ay is encoded as the same as English ay.
>
> My argument is that Latin, Cyrillic and Greek capital letters are
> essentially one and the same script.
> ...Not that I see a point in differentiating by script anyway. I would just
> stick with defining glyphs (shapes) and let the users sort out the meaning.
>
>
> >Unicode certainly has fudged a bunch of stuff up initially, and
> >unfortunately they can't fix it now. (One thing in particular, I think
> >they should have encoded small caps a long time ago. One of the
> >proposals that was linked to included a small-cap F and S, and
> >mentioned that the only other small caps left unencoded were Q and X.
> >Interesting, I thought, so I went on a hunt for all the small caps
> >(other than F, Q, S, and X). I could only find a handful of them, and
> >they're randomly dotted all over the place: Latin Extended A, IPA
> >Extensions, Letterlike Symbols, etc. But anyway, enough of my rant.)
> >
> >--
> >Hasta la pasta,
> >Jonathyn Bet'nct.
>
> But aren't there a lot of letters (OSVWXZ) which are exactly the same in
> small caps and lower case? If they're randomly dotted all over the place
> anyway, there isn't even the benefit of having the whole set in one place.
>
> John Vertical
>

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